LS-DY­NA has been used in the au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try for over 25 years, and its adop­tion con­tin­ues to grow. To­day, LS-DY­NA is the pri­ma­ry crash analy­sis tool for over 80% of the world’s ma­jor au­to­mo­tive OEMs, and the code is used by an es­ti­mat­ed 90% of tier 1 sup­pli­ers.

The phrase “de­sign-build-test” has been used to ac­cu­rate­ly de­scribe the tra­di­tion­al au­to­mo­tive de­vel­op­ment cy­cle. In re­cent years, how­ev­er, the in­dus­try has set a new goal of 1-year from con­cept to re­al­i­ty. With such an ag­gres­sive tar­get in mind, de­sign-build-test ap­proach has be­come in­creas­ing­ly im­prac­ti­cal.

LSTC pro­vides a so­lu­tion to this prob­lem with LS-DY­NA, which can be used to re­place a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of phys­i­cal test­ing with vir­tu­al test­ing. The bot­tom line is that firms can min­i­mize re­build­ing and retest­ing and ul­ti­mate­ly save on de­vel­op­ment time and cost.

LS-DY­NA is al­ready be­ing used for a wide va­ri­ety of au­to­mo­tive-re­lat­ed sim­u­la­tions. Some of the most com­mon analy­sis types in­clude:

• FMVSS201 Head Im­pact
• FMVSS207/­210 Seat­belt An­chor­age
• FMVSS208 Frontal Im­pact
• FMVSS214 Sta­t­ic & Dy­nam­ic Side Im­pact
• FMVSS216 Roof Crush
• FMVSS225 Child Re­straint An­chor­age
• FMVSS301 Rear Im­pact & Fu­el In­tegri­ty
• IIHS Off­set Frontal Im­pact
• IIHS Side Im­pact
• IIHS Low Speed Bumper Im­pact
• Grav­i­ty Load­ing
• Elas­tic Re­cov­ery Af­ter Dy­nam­ic Im­pact

Such analy­ses en­com­pass a wide va­ri­ety of com­plex phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na, and LS-DY­NA is equipped with vast ar­ray of fea­tures and ca­pa­bil­i­ties to repli­cate these events. These in­clude:

• An ex­ten­sive li­brary of ma­te­ri­als (more than any oth­er code) ca­pa­ble of ac­cu­rate­ly mod­el­ing steel, alu­minum, plas­tics, fab­ric, glass, rub­ber, foam, hon­ey­comb, and many oth­ers un­der both sta­t­ic and high-speed dy­nam­ic con­di­tions. Many of these ma­te­r­i­al mod­els al­so cap­ture vis­cous, rate-de­pen­dent, and hy­per­e­las­tic be­hav­ior, and there is a wide va­ri­ety of both brit­tle and duc­tile fail­ure op­tions avail­able.
• An ex­ten­sive se­lec­tion of ac­cu­rate and very gen­er­al con­tact al­go­rithms. These in­clude sur­face-to-sur­face con­tacts, erod­ing con­tacts, tied in­ter­faces, and many more.
• An ex­ten­sive se­lec­tion of airbag mod­el­ing tools. Avail­able meth­ods in­clude Con­trol Vol­ume, ALE, and CPM.
• An ex­ten­sive se­lec­tion of seat belt re­lat­ed fea­tures, in­clud­ing sliprings, re­trac­tors, pre-ten­sion­ers, and sen­sors.
• An ex­ten­sive se­lec­tion of join­ing meth­ods. These in­clude rigid con­nec­tions, bolts, and spotwelds. De­lam­i­na­tion of bod­ed struc­tures can al­so be mod­eled.
• Mul­ti-physics ca­pa­bil­i­ties to mod­el things like flu­id-struc­ture in­ter­ac­tion in fu­el tanks.

LSTC has al­so in­vest­ed tremen­dous ef­fort in de­vel­op­ing a large col­lec­tion of dum­my and bar­ri­er mod­els for use in crash sim­u­la­tions. These mod­els have been cor­re­lat­ed with phys­i­cal test re­sults and are com­plete­ly free when you pur­chase LS-DY­NA.

An­oth­er strength of LS-DY­NA that is crit­i­cal to the au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try is the scal­a­bil­i­ty of the MPP ver­sion of the code. With the abil­i­ty uti­lize hun­dreds (or even thou­sands) of CPUs for a sin­gle sim­u­la­tion run, de­tailed crash analy­ses that once took days can now be eas­i­ly turned around in a mat­ter of hours.